Blame Democrats for the State of the Union Circus
The tradition has mutated into something bigger, dumber, and more dysfunctional than the Framers ever could have imagined.
The executive is duty bound to provide the legislature with information and recommendations “from time to time,” as the State of the Union clause in Article II of the Constitution so vaguely puts it. The Framers were surely right to make the president accountable to Congress in this way. They were also probably right not to overthink it.
The State of the Union is not mentioned in James Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of. It pops up in just once, in Alexander Hamilton’s “Federalist No. 77,” and only to be discharged as one of the presidential powers he’s not even going to bother defending, as it would require an “insatiable avidity for censure to invent” objections to it.
